Canon City News

Senior Mini College: Police dogs part of anti-poaching efforts

Police dog trainer John Lutenberg discusses some of the characteristics he looks for when training a puppy for police work. (Sarah Matott/ Daily Record)

A small group of individuals attended Wednesday's lecture about training police dogs. The lecture was one of many classes being offered as the annual Senior Week at the Fremont Campus of Pueblo Community College. (Sarah Matott / Daily Record)

Two local police dog handlers are using their skills to combat illegal poaching in Africa.

A small group gathered Wednesday at the Fremont Campus of Pueblo Community College to see what it takes to train a police service dog as part of the annual Senior Mini College.

The hour-long lecture was led by two trainers, Linda Porter and John Lutenberg.

Porter has 11 years of previous experience as a reserve officer with the Cañon City Police Department, and Lutenberg worked with the Department of Corrections for 36 years.

The two discussed what goes into training a police service dog and the different number of duties a police dog would perform, such as suspect apprehension, drug and weapons detection, arson and bomb trafficking and even locating human remains.

However, it is what Porter and Lutenberg are doing away from the U.S. that reaches beyond training a dog for police service, as they shared the work they've done with anti-poaching in Africa.

In 2009, Porter said that they had received an email, which led them to helping locals at the Nigiro-are Outpost, near the Tanzanian border in Africa.

"We ended up volunteering our time and securing the bloodhounds they wanted," Porter said.

They trained the bloodhounds first in the U.S. and then continued to assist later in Africa. The Mara Conservancy introduced a dog tracking unit and started with two bloodhounds that Porter and Lutenberg helped train the animals and the handlers.

Advertisement

"Its been a five-year long project so far, with successful breeding and close to 100 poaching captures," Porter said.

During Wednesday's lecture, photos were shown of poachers that were apprehended by Porter and Lutenberg's dog tracking unit, and photos of the animals that have been saved because of their efforts.

She said that Mara is located in Kenya and that with their dog tracking assistant, they have helped the Mara Conservancy group capture poachers in the area.

"Before we received the email, I didn't know a lot about poaching before and I also though it was doable," Porter said, elaborating that she thought it would be easy to train dogs for anti-poaching purposes.

Porter said Wildlife Conservation Society estimates 96 elephants are killed each day and that black rhinoceros poaching is at its highest in history.

"When we arrived and stepped off the plan and drove to our location, our jaws dropped to the ground," she said.

She said that not only was the situation dangerous, but the environment in which they were training the two bloodhounds and the handlers in was extreme.

Since the inception of the program, only one dog has passed, but a healthy litter has been born.

Porter and Lutenberg said that they are both now more aware of the illegal poaching that takes place in Africa and that the initiative to stop illegal poachers is close to their hearts.

Article Comments

We reserve the right to remove any comment that violates our ground rules, is spammy, NSFW, defamatory, rude, reckless to the community, etc.

We expect everyone to be respectful of other commenters. It's fine to have differences of opinion, but there's no need to act like a jerk.

Use your own words (don't copy and paste from elsewhere), be honest and don't pretend to be someone (or something) you're not.

Our commenting section is self-policing, so if you see a comment that violates our ground rules, flag it (mouse over to the far right of the commenter's name until you see the flag symbol and click that), then we'll review it.